A Question For You

Good morning and welcome to Our Daily Walk.

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A college football coach was hired recently for $4 million a year. Is he worth it? Well, that depends on how you determine worth? If he wins games and brings in more revenue, then certainly he can pay for himself. But that really doesn’t answer whether or not he is worth $4 million a year.

While you and I will likely never be in a position to earn such an enormous salary the question might still be valid, “what are you worth?” The answer, of course, depends on how you determine worth.

Several articles have been written on what the human body is worth. If one takes the chemical composition of the body and then applies a market value for elements such as calcium, potassium, carbon, hydrogen, etc., one will find that we really aren’t worth very much. Some say only a few dollars.

But when those elements are combined into a functioning body we are certainly very valuable. Insurance companies have fixed relative values to human body parts such as bone marrow, lungs, eyes, hearts, etc. Although we can not sell our parts to others, if we were to add up all of the possible donations that could be made, our bodies would hold a value of several million dollars.

So a valid question to you might be, “what are you worth?” James asks a similar question in James 4:13-16. This passage asks the reader to contemplate one’s own life.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

What are we worth? What is our life? Reflecting on our own mortality and our date with eternity we should hopefully place a great value on this day and on our righteous standing before God.

But that is still viewing what we are worth through our eyes. David writes about this issue as he asks why God is attentive to us. In all of the majesty of creation, why is man so highly regarded by God. Notice this reading from Psalm 8:1-9.

O Lord, our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth, Who have set Your glory above the heavens! Out of the mouth of babes and nursing infants You have ordained strength, Because of Your enemies, That You may silence the enemy and the avenger. When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You are mindful of him, And the son of man that You visit him? For You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You have crowned him with glory and honor. You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands; You have put all things under his feet, All sheep and oxen-- Even the beasts of the field, The birds of the air, And the fish of the sea That pass through the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, How excellent is Your name in all the earth!

God made us in His image and gave us an eternal spirit. God sent His son to die for us on the cruel cross. God invites us to accept His grace and forgiveness of our sins. God wants us to be with Him for all eternity in heaven.

Are we worth it? Well, that depends on how we determine worth. From our perspective we have certainly not earned or merited this value from God.

But from God’s perspective we are individually valuable to Him. Despite the ways in which we continually fall short of His expectations, God wants us to know that we are always worth something to Him.

Peter writes in 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.”

On Our Daily Walk today, may we realize the enormous value that we hold in God’s eyes and may we conduct our lives knowing how valuable we are.

Our thought for the day: “It is in our lives and not in our words that our religion must be read.” Thomas Jefferson

May God bless you on your daily walk.

© Our Daily Walk, Mike Baker, 2007. Permission is granted to copy these articles provided they are not sold and the author's name and copyright are included.